In my early twenties, the “spinster wish” was my private shorthand for the novel pleasures of being alone. As I grew older, and felt more strongly the cultural expectation of marriage, the words became more like a thought experiment, a way to imagine in detail what it would look like to never settle down.When author Kate Bolick was twenty-three, her mother died of cancer. Feeling obligated to live out the life her mother could have had, and missing the constant mother-daughter conversations they had enjoyed, Bolick began having “conversations” with independent woman thinkers from the past; those whom Bolick refers to as her “awakeners”: Pulitzer Prize winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who also wrote satirical columns as Nancy Boyd for Vanity Fair; essayist Maeve Brennan, who wrote the Long-Winded Lady column for The New Yorker; columnist Neith Boyce,Vogue’s Bachelor Girl; novelist Edith Wharton; and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, most notable as the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Spinster is part memoir, part social commentary, and part biography of these awakeners. I saw it shelved at my local bookstore with other “Big Idea” books and it is hyped as “A bold, original, moving book that will inspire fanatical devotion and ignite debate“, but, meh. My biggest problems with this book are that Bolick's experience isn't common – so it doesn't translate into universal truths – and although the biographies of these extraordinary women were interesting (and especially as Bolick was able to interview some primary sources that may not have shared their stories before), what Bolick was able to take from their lives didn't feel earth-shattering to me:
Maeve, the first of my five awakeners, had supplied an image and point of view that set my adulthood into motion. Neith had given me the words to think critically about marriage, and actually establish a life of my own. Edna had led me through those early, confusing years of sex as a single person. What Edith taught me was this: to live happily alone requires a serious amount of intentional thought...Charlotte showed me that we become adults by learning how to be responsible to ourselves, whether or not we're married or have children.And if what Bolick primarily took from these women was how to live self-sufficiently, only beholden to one's art, as a spinster, I don't know what to think of the fact that each of these women eventually “joined the majority” and became married themselves.
As for Bolick: she has spent her adult life in a series of years-long committed relationships (which, here in Canada, would count as repeatedly being common-law married), and every time she remembers that she hasn't written anything significant yet (which she knows is her purpose and her passion despite not creating anything, even while sequestered at an exclusive writer's retreat), she breaks up with her boyfriend and lives alone again...until the next guy comes along. In between, she has lots of casual sex, can't “walk down the street without ending up on a date”, and lives an impossible Sex and the City NYC lifestyle of cocktail parties, nice clothes, and a dreamy Brooklyn Heights apartment. As a freelance columnist, when she wants to experience Maeve Brennan's famed perfume, Bolick proposes an article on signature scents and Chanel sends her a full sized bottle of Cuir De Russie. As an editor at a home decorating magazine, when Bolick sees photos of an English farmhouse once rented by Virginia Woolf's sister, she convinces her magazine's stylists to redecorate her own apartment in its image as a feature article. Much like the successful white women that Bolick identified with as her “awakeners”, Bolick herself has lived a life of relative success that few of us can identify with – and yes, she has money problems sometimes, and yes, she turns her back on everything in the end to rediscover her art; presumably the writing of this book – but ultimately, this is a very niche project. Bolick doesn't look into the lives of those we might properly think of as spinsters – those women who desperately want marriage and children but never find their match – nor does she look at the lives of poor single mothers, widows, lesbians, or even non-white non-wealthy women (she does mention Billie Holliday in passing and notes that she can't comment on the singer's spinsterism because “the political, social, and economic forces that shape the African American single experience is an entire book unto itself”).
Throughout Spinster, the reader feels as though Bolick is fighting against something, but what that something is, isn't clear. She complains of societal expectations for women to marry, but includes data that says that hers is now the norm: women are choosing not to marry, or to marry later, or to leave their marriages. Bolick presents the experiences of her awakeners as the template for her own life, yet discovers that each of them married, often finding ways to carve out an independent place in which to continue writing. She writes of feeling the need to live out her mother's aspirations after her too young death, but even that is curious to me: Bolick's mother married and had two children, yes, but she also found time to be a freelance writer and politically active. And when she died at fifty-two, she was surrounded by the loving family she had spent her adult life creating:
Did we all spend the night in the hospital? All I know is that at seven o'clock the next morning the three of us were sprawled on her bed, holding her hands. She didn't breathe so much as gurgle, as if drowning. She actually was drowning. The sound was unbearable. We stroked her arms, told her over and over how much we loved her, as if our words could penetrate her unconscious state.Why is Bolick fighting against having that? I may be a part of the larger society, but I have no expectations for Bolick; I am neither jealous nor condemnatory of the single woman; she can marry or not, have children or not as she chooses. It feels like, with this book, Bolick is fighting a specific war that has already been won – by the very women she admires – fifty to a hundred years ago. Bottom line: Bolick had opportunities to get married, chose not to, and so what? Yet, what redeemed Spinster for me was getting to know the awakeners; these were all women who chose spinsterism – at least temporarily – in service to their muses, at a time when that was very hard to do.
